[Pyramidologist]

(Original post by sugar-n-spice)
How did the Scythians get all the way up into Ireland?

He's discussing foundation myths. The Scoti (Irish) were equated to the Scythians by earlier historians, this was usually through a dubious philological connection. William Camden for example wrote: ''[W]hen the Roman Empire beganne now to decay, the nation of the Scots or Scythians grew mighty in Ireland (1610: 66).

[Pyramidologist]

(Original post by KCosmo)
Why is there a rectangle on the EU line?

Neanderthals.

[Pastaferian]

(Original post by sugar-n-spice)
How did the Scythians get all the way up into Ireland?

Descend from the Scythians is the foundation myth of Ireland (the British foundation myth is that the island was settled by refugees from Troy). There is no archaeological basis in either myth, and the early "historians" who wrote them down were documenting folklore. Having said that, Celtic culture did once spread right across Europe to the Ukraine, which is the Scythians homeland.

[Pyramidologist]

(Original post by whyumadtho)
As I said, there is evidence for both theories (polygenism isn't an accepted theory), but the evidence better conforms to the OOA model (not necessarily the strict one, as you represented in your sixth diagram). The mtDNA evidence does not support the MRH model that you are suggesting, meaning the notion of a pure and separate lineage is unfounded.

The genetic evidence does not contradict the polygenist or multiregional models - as long as they accept peripheral geneflow. Only model 1 is obsolete, its last proponent was Paul Broca in 1864. All the other models are not obsolete and have scientific proponents. Modern polygenists (model 2) accept the reality of gene migration (change in allele frequencies) but argue there is no monophyletic upstream common ancestor.

http://www.articlesafari.com/2010/09...e-from-africa/

In a paper widely trumpeted and due for release in book form, Akhil Bakshi, the leader of a recent major scientific expedition supported by India’s prime minister, claims that “Negroid”, “Caucasian” and “Mongoloid” peoples are not only separate races but separate species, having evolved on different continents

[whyumadtho]

(Original post by Pyramidologist)
Different traits are clustered through metric variables and indices (multivariate analyses):

I really can't believe you're using Ousley et al. and Konigsberg et al. Being disingenuous by misrepresenting the conclusions and purposes of various studies only undermines your argument:

"In Japan, DFA using 18 variables classified Howells’ Northern and Southern Japan samples 89% correctly, and K-means cluster analysis allocated 81% of each Japanese group into separate clusters. Therefore, the Northern and Southern Japan samples would also represent different biological races. It would seem that the number of biological races may be limited only by the number of samples, contradicting the classic view that there are only a few discrete biological races. [...] if biological distinctiveness is an accepted criterion for biological races, a very large number of biological races can be discerned using craniometric data alone. [...] There are so many possible distinctive biological races that the concept is virtually meaningless" (Ousley et al., 2009).

"Using the Iowa priors, the highest posterior probability is for ‘‘American White’’ at 0.6976. The identification of ‘‘Easter Islander,’’ which had the highest posterior when we used an uninformative prior, now has a relatively low posterior probability (0.0449). In contrast, using the Hawaii priors the posterior probability that ‘‘Mr. Johnson’’ was an ‘‘Easter Islander’’ is 0.9068, whereas the posterior probability that he was an ‘‘American White’’ was 0.0188. Using the Gary, Indiana prior the highest posterior probability (0.5342) was for ‘‘American Black’’ with ‘‘American White’’ having the second highest posterior probability (0.2728). [...]

The use of different priors also shows the importance of prior information, as ‘Mr. Johnson’ would have been classified as a Pacific Islander had his remains been found on Hawaii and as an ‘American Black’ had his remains been found in Gary, Indiana.

[...] forensic anthropologists are not particularly adept at identifying races when they must deal with a very heterogeneous population at large, and this is the one setting in which a definitive racial identification would be useful [...]

We believe that our results contribute substantially to a rhetorical question posed by Sauer (1992): ‘‘If races don’t exist, why are forensic anthropologists so good at identifying them?’’ In large measure, we suspect that forensic anthropologists are ‘‘so good at identifying’’ races because practicing forensic anthropologists are essentially implicit Bayesians. Although forensic anthropologists typically ask that they not be given any prior information when they conduct an osteological analysis [see Steadman and Konigsberg’s (2003, p 67–68) comments on ‘‘The Problem of Bias’’], they do often know something about the origin of the case. When Steadman first examined ‘‘Mr. Johnson’s’’ skull (his postcranial remains were later recovered) she knew that it had been found in an eastern Iowa creek. Thus she was not predisposed to think the skull might be from, for example, a Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. As a consequence, the only data considered in the initial FORDISC 2.0 analysis of the skull (Steadman and Konigsberg, 2003, p 68) were ‘‘white, Asian, black, and American Indian male samples from the Forensic Data Bank’’ (Konigsberg et al., 2009).

"When osteologists start with a cultural, linguistic, or geographical limit on the population sample to be analyzed, the group has been defined beforehand, without regard for the possible biological relationships of the individuals in the sample, if there is indeed one" (Reed, 2006)

"Forensic anthropology is most often employed in the personal identification of human remains from crime scenes or mass disasters. Part of the identification process in identifying unknown remains is the construction of the biological profile, with parameters such as [...] race [...] to compare to possible individual identifications" (Ousley et al., 2009).

Thus, they will obviously rely on these arbitrary classification mechanisms to conform to whatever the law enforcement agency's system of classification requires.

Resolve the logical problem presented by Livingstone (2008).

"The points of agreement in the following articles reflect a shared evolutionary perspective that focuses on describing and interpreting the apportionment of biological variation between individuals both within and among groups (see also Lee et al., 2008). We agreed that:

• There is substantial variation among individuals within populations.
• Some biological variation is apportioned between individuals in different populations and among larger population groupings.
• Patterns of within- and among-group variation have been substantially shaped by culture, language, ecology, and geography.
• Race is not an accurate or productive way to describe human biological variation.
• Human variation research has important social, biomedical, and forensic implications."

"There was really only one fundamental difference of opinion among the symposium participants, which was about the precise nature of the geographic patterning of human biological variation" (Edgar and Hunley, 2009; Caspari, 2009; Edgar, 2009; Gravlee, 2009; Hunley et al., 2009; Konigsberg et al., 2009; Long et al., 2009; Ousley et al., 2009; Relethford, 2009; Wolpoff, 2009).

[whyumadtho]

(Original post by Pyramidologist)
The genetic evidence does not contradict the polygenist or multiregional models - as long as they accept peripheral geneflow. Only model 1 is obsolete, its last proponent was Paul Broca in 1864. All the other models are not obsolete and have scientific proponents. Modern polygenists (model 2) accept the reality of gene migration (change in allele frequencies) but argue there is no monophyletic upstream common ancestor.

http://www.articlesafari.com/2010/09...e-from-africa/

It violates any claim to discreteness. The mtDNA evidence demonstrates the existence of a monophlyetic upstream common ancestor.

Why did you link that article?

[Pyramidologist]

(Original post by whyumadtho)
It violates any claim to discreteness. The mtDNA evidence demonstrates the existence of a monophlyetic upstream common ancestor.

Why did you link that article?

There is no genetic evidence for monophyletic common descent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multire...netic_evidence

The original mitochondrial DNA results and the resulting recent African replacement theory posed a serious challenge to the multiregional hypothesis. Mitochondrial DNA alone, however, could not entirely rule out interbreeding between early modern and archaic humans, since archaic human mitochondrial strains from such interbreeding could have been lost due to genetic drift or a selective sweep

As outlined in bold everything can be alternitively explained through geneflow.

[whyumadtho]

(Original post by Pyramidologist)
There is no genetic evidence for monophyletic common descent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multire...netic_evidence



As outlined in bold everything can be alternitively explained through geneflow.

Exceedingly unlikely, however:

"Neandertals, the archaic human form documented in Eurasia until 29,000 years ago, share no mitochondrial haplotype with modern Europeans. Whether this means that the two groups were reproductively isolated is controversial, and indeed nuclear data have been interpreted as suggesting that they admixed. We explored the range of demographic parameters that may have generated the observed mitochondrial diversity, simulating 3.0 million genealogies under six models differing as for the relationships among contemporary Europeans, Neandertals, and Upper Palaeolithic European early modern humans (EEMH), who coexisted with Neandertals for millennia. We compared by Approximate Bayesian Computations the simulation results with mitochondrial diversity in 7 Neandertals, 3 EEMH, and 150 opportunely chosen modern Europeans. A model of genealogical continuity between EEMH and contemporary Europeans, with no Neandertal contribution, received overwhelming support from the analyses. The maximum degree of Neandertal admixture, under the model of gene flow supported by nuclear data, was estimated at 1.5%, but this model proved 20-32 times less likely than a model without any gene flow" (Ghirotto et al., 2011).

[whyumadtho]

I also found this funny:

(Original post by Pyramidologist)
lol. None of those are forensic anthropologists. They are evolutionary (cultural) biologists or physical anthropologists who do not specialise in osteology. These simply aren't people in labs who study crania and bones.

World leading experts in forensic anthropology all accept the reality of race.

And here you are quoting Ousley et al. and Konigsberg et al. who you, just a couple of weeks ago, considered not to be "people in labs who study crania and bones".

[AverageExcellence]

I didn't realise there was so much debate behind my idle question lol. But its interesting to know all these extra facts, cheers all!

[Psyk]

(Original post by sugar-n-spice)
Showing ur ignorance now aren't we. Der is loads of different ethnicities in those countries.

I know there are lots of ethnicities in those countries, but ethnicity is not the same as race. Now who's showing their ignorance?

This the fourth time I've said this in this thread. And the first time was the first reply! So it seems people don't even bother reading that far. I don't know why I bother, I don't suppose anyone will read this post. Maybe people only read the very last reply before they decide to post.

[sugar-n-spice]

(Original post by Psyk)
I know there are lots of ethnicities in those countries, but ethnicity is not the same as race. Now who's showing their ignorance?

This the fourth time I've said this in this thread. And the first time was the first reply! So it seems people don't even bother reading that far. I don't know why I bother, I don't suppose anyone will read this post. Maybe people only read the very last reply before they decide to post.

Well obviously Pakistanis and Afghans are the same race, just as Pakistanis and Brits are the same race, but different ethnicities.

[Psyk]

(Original post by sugar-n-spice)
Well obviously Pakistanis and Afghans are the same race, just as Pakistanis and Brits are the same race, but different ethnicities.

Yeah, that was my point.

[Maddog Jones]

Irish = Welsh = Scottish

English = Dutch = Germans

Two distinct chains. Obviously, there's been so much 'inter-breeding' any attempts to divide between the separate ones are largely useless.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/2076470.stm

[Pyramidologist]

(Original post by whyumadtho)
I also found this funny:



And here you are quoting Ousley et al. and Konigsberg et al. who you, just a couple of weeks ago, considered not to be "people in labs who study crania and bones".

They are included in the Sesardic (2010) quote. I didn't personally quote them.

[whyumadtho]

(Original post by Pyramidologist)
They are included in the Sesardic (2010) quote. I didn't personally quote them.

But you referenced them by proxy, despite explicitly asserting your belief that they lacked any credibility.

[democracyforum]

For you to decide if the Irish and British are different,

you are assuming that there is a default British person and identity to compare to. And what would that be ?

[sugar-n-spice]

(Original post by Psyk)
Yeah, that was my point.

Pakistanis and Chinese are not the same race you know, however.

[Psyk]

(Original post by sugar-n-spice)
Pakistanis and Chinese are not the same race you know, however.

Yeah, if the concept of race is to exist at all then clearly they wouldn't be the same race. It's hard to pin down the exact thing that makes them different races though. I suppose what I'm saying isn't that race doesn't exist, more than it's not very precise.

[Pyramidologist]

(Original post by Psyk)
Yeah, if the concept of race is to exist at all then clearly they wouldn't be the same race. It's hard to pin down the exact thing that makes them different races though. I suppose what I'm saying isn't that race doesn't exist, more than it's not very precise.

Races are a biological reality. They are not unique to Homo Sapiens:

Let me begin with race. There is a widespread feeling that the word "race" indicates something undesirable and that it should be left out of all discussions. This leads to such statements as "there are no human races."

Those who subscribe to this opinion are obviously ignorant of modern biology. Races are not something specifically human; races occur in a large percentage of species of animals. You can read in every textbook on evolution that geographic races of animals, when isolated from other races of their species, may in time become new species. The terms "subspecies" and "geographic race" are used interchangeably.

Mayr (2002)